Don’t Be Controlled By Your Emotions. It Doesn’t Work.

Are you prone to allowing yourself to slip into your emotional ego when challenged in the business environment… or for any reason at all? Some business owners default to emotional tirades at the drop of a hat when challenged, when something goes wrong, when in a discussion and someone disagrees, when promises are broken… the list is endless. Emotional tirades are far too common and occur whenever some action in the moment triggers this default mechanism. We are all guilty of this to some degree.

Emotional outbursts can be a knee-jerk default mechanism for many when pressured or challenged. Simply stated, this does not work at all!

Stop it. Change this, make it go away, or at least control it. It is dangerous to your well-being and certainly dangerous to your business. In fact, if it happens in your business it likely happens elsewhere in your life as well, with your family, in social settings, etc. It is a “default mechanism” programmed to appear as a defense or offense when something happens to trigger it. Your first objective is to become aware that you do this, identify the issue in yourself, maybe even figure out what triggers it (although the answer probably is anything).

The next step is to realize that this response mechanism simply does not work. Decisions made while in an emotional state will be bad decisions. Emotional decision-making and responses must be removed from your life. It does not work.

Then, the larger issue to address is how to change your response default, remove emotion and replace it with objective logic. This is tough to do and one needs help to overcome this bad habit. First, you need trusted people around who can be asked to call you out when you begin to do this, helping you to see it and identify it as well as giving you the opportunity to change your response and alter your actions and reactions. This will be very difficult at first but if you trust your people to help you and if you want to change, you will pay attention to them when they give you the signal and will do what they say–control your emotions.

Eventually, you will see your emotional reactions are ineffective and you will want to change and will slowly adopt the new habit, using logic not emotion. You will find it works much, much better and you will change your way. It will happen slowly at first, as you default to emotion less and less until you are mostly in control of yourself and your emotions, making better decisions, modifying your habits and replacing emotional reactions with a better commitment.

It is a tough habit to break, but an important one to deal with. Do it. Start today. Ask for help and work at it.